Three things about the dshow backend, all of them found by reading rather
than by running, so all three want checking on a real Windows machine.
The device listing is parsed in both of the shapes ffmpeg has printed it in:
newer builds mark every device `(audio)` or `(video)`, older ones print a
heading and no marks, and only the first was read. Each pattern is anchored at
both ends now, so the error lines the command ends with, which quote the device
name it was told to look for, are no longer read as a device of that name.
What is stored for a device is the alternative name under it rather than the
friendly one. A laptop with a headset plugged in has two microphones called the
same thing, and `audio=Microphone` reaches the first of them whichever one was
picked; the alternative name is unique. The friendly name stays what is shown,
which is what the (id, description) pair in these lists has always been for.
An unset microphone meant "the first one listed", and the listing costs an
ffmpeg of its own, so every press of the key paid for a process before the
recording started. The last listing is remembered instead, and opening Settings
or running `dikte devices` takes a fresh one.
And a fourth thing, which is about what the interface says rather than what it
does: whether the far side of a meeting can be captured at all is now an entry
in `audio.Sound` instead of being read off an empty device list. The two are not
the same answer. An empty list on Linux means pactl is not installed, which a
user can go and fix; False on Windows means there is no such device and no
driver that would add one. The Meeting tab says so under the empty box, and
starting a meeting says it instead of sending somebody to Settings to pick from
a list that will never have anything in it.
Three of the four collisions were the same one: master moved the directory
rule into paths.py while this branch was adding a Windows case to the copy in
config.py and the second copy in ggml.py. The case moves to paths.py with the
rest of it, and the directories test moves to tests/test_paths.py where master
put its neighbours.
The fourth is MeetingRecorder, which now starts a process per capture device.
Windows keeps its two lines there: no console window for either process, and
a stop that terminates rather than sending a signal the platform does not have.
A recording is never deleted for being disappointing. A microphone that
handed over nothing still leaves the right channel, which is everyone
else, and an hour of them is worth more than the empty channel costs; the
one thing the user cannot get back is the half that was there. So the
exact-zero check stays and stops throwing the file away: it says what the
microphone did, in a tray warning next to the recording being written up,
and the minutes are produced from what there is.
Reading the two capture pipes in turn from one thread put the failure it
was meant to fix back in a worse place. A microphone that stops delivering
leaves that read waiting forever, and the far side is not read either
until its pipe fills and its ffmpeg stops writing into it: the meeting
freezes, the levels sit still, and nothing is said for as long as nobody
looks. Each stream now has a reader of its own and a queue, so neither can
hold the other up, and a side that has said nothing for STALL_SECONDS ends
the recording the way a dead ffmpeg already did, out loud and keeping what
was captured.
Which system needs how many processes belongs in the table with everything
else that differs, so meeting() returns the list of commands it takes:
one on PulseAudio, one per device on a Mac. meeting_commands() is the
chooser again rather than a function with a Mac inside it, and the empty
entry in COREAUDIO is gone. The two AVFoundation targets are resolved
against a single device listing, which costs one ffmpeg run instead of two
and cannot see the indexes renumber between the microphone and the far
side.
Windows joins the three systems as its own entry in each table: DirectShow
through ffmpeg for capture, the Win32 clipboard and SendInput for the paste,
RegisterHotKey for the global shortcut, and the whisper.cpp and llama.cpp
Windows zips (the OpenBLAS whisper build, which transcribes about twice as
fast on a plain CPU). Settings go to APPDATA, data to LOCALAPPDATA, and
install.ps1 adds the Start Menu entry, the dikte command and an optional
autostart. Meetings are not supported yet: Windows offers nothing to record
the far side from.
Porting surfaced three fixes that were not Windows specific:
- A stopped or overlong download tried to delete its .part file while still
holding it open, which Windows refuses. The unlinks now wait for the handle.
- The CLI transcribed files without handing the local servers their settings
first, so a local provider failed with "no model downloaded" wherever the
GUI had not run in the same process.
- The audio content types are pinned instead of asked of the registry, which
answers differently machine to machine.
One fix is Windows specific but sits in shared code: shutdown() does not end
a blocked recv there, so stopping a request also closes the socket handle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
--raw arrived in 1.4, the same release that stopped reading a bare "-" as
raw on its own. The split is there rather than at 1.0: Ubuntu 24.10 and
anything else on 1.2 refuses the option too, and 1.4 onwards writes a
container around the stream without it.
Asking the installed binary meant the command tests ran pw-record --help
four times for real, on a machine whose answer decides what they see, which
the module docstring promises they never do. They pin the answer in setUp,
and the reading itself gets its own class, the empty help nobody covered
included.
recording_command became a table of sound systems while this branch was
open, so the pw-record command it patched now lives in _pulse_record. The
check moves there with it, and nothing else about it changes.
Dikte already chose its clipboard programs once instead of in every
function; macOS joins that table rather than adding a branch to each one.
A Mac copies through pbcopy and presses Cmd+V straight into CoreGraphics,
records through AVFoundation, and asks Carbon for its global shortcuts.
The three tables are paste.Desktop, audio.Sound, and the pair of
predicates in hotkey.py. Each reads sys.platform inside the chooser, so a
test can stand somewhere else: 697 of the 737 tests now run on any
machine, the Wayland and X11 halves included, and the suite passes whole
whichever system it is run on.
Two things a Mac does not have needed saying rather than pretending:
there is no shortcut registry to install into, so Settings offers no
Install button and the listener is the mechanism instead of a fallback;
and nothing is offered as the sound the speakers are playing, so a
meeting needs BlackHole or Loopback and says so. The KDE-only labels
around them were already wrong on GNOME, and now name whichever desktop
is there.
Co-authored-by: firat <[email protected]>
Left alone, parec buffers about two seconds and then hands the lot over at
once. Measured against the chunk the level meter reads:
parec, as it was longest gap 2005 ms
parec --latency-msec=64 longest gap 86 ms
pw-record longest gap 129 ms
On a machine that has parec, which is every PulseAudio one and every PipeWire
one with the compatibility service, the waveform stood still and then jumped,
looking like a microphone that was not picking anything up. The recording
itself was fine, but the tail of one can be lost that way too: stop() ends the
process, and whatever is still held back goes with it.
The number asked for is the meter's own chunk, which is the unit the rest of
this file is measured in.
The pump now says when the capture ended with nothing captured, which is worth
saying: parec refusing the device looks like silence otherwise. But stop() ends
it the same way, so a recording shorter than 0.3 s raised that alarm first and
"Recording too short" second, sending the user after a sound server that is
fine. It follows the flag MeetingRecorder already carries for this.
test_desktop_compat.py moves into the files for the modules it covers, so a
test is where the next person looking at that module will find it.
Who said what is the hard part of a meeting transcript, and the usual answer
is to hand one mixed recording to a model and ask it to tell the voices apart.
That guess is wrong often enough to be worse than useless in minutes, where a
decision attributed to the wrong person is a decision nobody made.
So the question never reaches a model. ffmpeg records the microphone and the
default sink's monitor as one stereo stream, you on the left and everyone else
on the right, and one process reading both is what keeps them aligned over an
hour. Each channel is transcribed on its own and the two are interleaved on a
single timeline, so attribution is settled by the wire a voice arrived on.
What a microphone picks up from the speakers lands on both channels; our copy
is dropped when it overlaps theirs in time and says nearly the same thing.
The stream is written to disk as it arrives rather than held in memory, so
length costs nothing and a crash costs the tail instead of the whole meeting.
Every stage the run reaches is recorded in meetings.jsonl, so a failure while
summarising does not throw away the transcription of an hour of audio: the
retry reads the transcript back out of the document and picks up from there.
A run that dies keeps its recording whether or not audio is being kept.
The minutes model is configured on its own, under Settings, with its own
prompt, and it is told who was expected in the room so the names come out
spelled right. It is told outright that the transcript is a record of other
people talking, not instructions addressed to it.
The built-in listener now holds several bindings rather than one, and the KDE
side is parameterised by desktop id, so the meeting toggle gets a shortcut of
its own on the same footing as the dictation one.
The screenshots were downscaled to 430 px wide, which made the UI text
blurry. Restore them at native 1292 px as lossless WebP, which is also
half the size of the original PNGs (72 KB against 155 KB for the largest).
Rewrite every em dash in prose, comments, docstrings and interface strings
as ordinary punctuation.
Ctrl+Space starts and stops a recording. The audio goes to OpenAI for
transcription, a model on OpenRouter strips the fillers and restores
punctuation, and the result is copied and pasted into the focused window.
Only the Python standard library and PyQt6 — HTTP, multipart uploads and
WAV writing are all hand-rolled.
- pw-record captures raw 16 kHz mono PCM with a live level meter
- the corner indicator is drawn through XWayland, since a Wayland client
cannot position its own window
- silence is caught before it costs an API call, relative to each
recording's own noise floor, plus a filter for the stock phrases models
invent when handed silence
- audio and video files can be transcribed too, optionally with [mm:ss]
timestamps, chunked through ffmpeg for long inputs
- global shortcut installs as a KDE custom shortcut, with an evdev
listener as a fallback until the session is restarted
- Turkish and English interface, following the system locale by default
yusufipek
